In addition, in my past work, we would have to turn sg offloading off to get any proper internal networking performance to work properly on Xen. Otherwise on the same dom0, domU <-> domU would result in speeds of 20 KB/s.

Finally, Red Hat suggests that if you’re encountering any type of performance issue on Virtualized guests that are running VirtIO, you disable tso and gso on the host-node as best practice:

Network Performance Issues

If you experience low performance with the virtio network drivers, verify the setting for the GSO and TSO features on the host system. The virtio network drivers require that the GSO and TSO options are disabled for optimal performance.

Verify the status of the GSO and TSO settings, use the command on the host (replacing interface with the network interface used by the guest):

# ethtool -k interface

Disable the GSO and TSO options with the following commands on the host:

# ethtool -K interface gso off
# ethtool -K interface tso off

I’ve gotten feedback about gso not being an issue, and yes – the chksums are incorrect since they’re calculated later, but this is all extra strain on a system and that’s not necessary, upon scaling at 1Gbps+ of networking, your incorrect checksums add up to poor performance. Add internal networking and an ethernet adapter or two, and you’re suffering from performance issues – in the least.

In short, turn GSO and TSO off at the host-node level, especially br0. It’s best practice, and the bug reports of TSO and GSO causing instability on hypervisors, amongst other offloading such as sg means you should stick with Red Hat’s advice, everyone’s findings, and simply disable it on the host-node interfaces, then troubleshoot if you’re still having trouble. In the least, a known feature causing issues that has no advantages to guests will be gone.

Also, it’s not just to hide the checksum errors from UDP, but because it’s likely causing hard to duplicate network issues across your host-node if you’re stumped, be it UDP performance or a dying internal network.